PODCAST · technology
The freeCodeCamp Podcast
by freeCodeCamp.org
The official podcast of the freeCodeCamp.org open source community. Each week, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews developers, founders, and ambitious people in tech.Learn to math, programming, and computer science for free, and turbo-charge your developer career with our free open source curriculum: https://www.freecodecamp.org
Episodes
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#217 Stanford's youngest instructor on InfoSec, AI, catching cheaters - Rachel Fernandez
Today Quincy Larson interviews Rachel An Fernandez. She's a computer science student at Stanford and the youngest instructor at the entire university. She recently helped organize TreeHacks, Stanford's annual hackathon, which narrowed 15,000 applicants down to just 1,000 participants. They built...
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#216 How to friction-max your learning with software engineer Jessica Rose
Today Quincy Larson interviews Jessica Rose. She's a dev and teacher who's worked on open data projects at Mozilla and lots of open source projects. We talk about: - How the whole world is hard, and how embracing that difficulty rather than avoiding it can make you a better thinker - The Bad...
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#215 How to learn programming and CS in the AI hype era – interview with dev and prof Mark Mahoney
Today Quincy Larson interviews Mark Mahoney. He worked as a dev before becoming a computer science professor. He's taught computer science for 23 years at Carthage College, a 180-year-old US university. He's also taught thousands of developers through his free programming courses built on top of...
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#214 Lessons from 15,031 hours of coding live on Twitch with Chris Griffing
Today Quincy Larson interviews Chris Griffing is a software engineer and prolific streamer of live coding on Twitch. He spent 10 years as a "snowboard bum" doing odd jobs at ski resorts to facilitate him spending as much time on the mountain as possible. At age 28 he taught himself PHP…
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#213 What happens when the model CAN'T fix it? Interview with software engineer Landon Gray
Today Quincy Larson interviews Landon Gray. He's a software engineer who worked at agencies for years. Then he taught himself AI assisted software development. And now he's helping other devs do the same. Landon's famous for proving that RAG pipelines can be written in Ruby and popularizing Ruby…
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#212 The world still needs people who care - CodePen founder Chris Coyier interview
Today Quincy Larson interviews Chris Coyier. He's a front-end developer and co-founder of CodePen and the CSS Tricks blog. He has also recorded more than 700 podcasts about software engineering. We talk about: - How he thinks front-end development tools are 90% of the way to where they need to be…
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#211 How to Land Freelance Clients with Small Business Whisperer Luke Ciciliano (Developer Interview)
Today Quincy Larson interviews Luke Ciciliano. He's a front-end developer who runs Modern Website Design, a software consultancy that builds solutions for small to medium sized businesses. He taught himself programming in the 1980s and started landing clients in the 1990s. He's going to share…
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#210 There are 2 kinds of devs. One of them is screwed. Justin Searls interview
Today Quincy Larson interviews Justin Searls. He's a software engineer who cofounded a software agency 15 years ago that's still going – even after he figured out how to make a lot of money quickly and retire at age 38 once he had enough savings. These days he's gone from solving problems for...
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#209 The ultimate dev skill is Integration Testing – Interview with Internet of Bugs
Today Quincy Larson interviews Carl Brown, who runs the Internet of Bugs YouTube channel and has worked as a dev at Amazon, IBM, Sun Microsystems, and startups for over 37 years. We talk about: - The hype versus the utility in LLMs and agent code generation tools - Why you might want to target...
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#208 The three paths AI could take from here - Shawn Wang SWYX interview
Today Quincy Larson interviews Shawn Wang. He's a software engineer, founder of the AI Engineer conference, and host of the Latent Space podcast focused on applying the latest models toward getting work done. We talk about: - How even if LLMs plateau, there will be still paths to better output...
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#207 Why maintaining a codebase is so damn hard – with OhMyZSH creator Robby Russell
Today Quincy Larson interviews Robby Russell. Robby created the open-source project Oh My ZSH. Oh My Zsh is a framework for managing your Zsh configuration for your command line terminal. It's been extremely popular among developers for more than a decade. Robby is also the CEO of Planet Argon, a...
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#206 Tips from a 20-year developer veteran turned consultancy founder – Tapas Adhikary interview
Today Quincy Larson interviews Tapas Adhikari. He's a software engineer who runs a firm of 20 developers who build projects for companies around the world. He's also a prolific teacher, having written 300 programming tutorials - including 47 for freeCodeCamp – and runs a popular English and...
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#205 How to stay curious as a dev in the AI hype era with Sumit Saha
Today Quincy Larson interviews Sumit Saha, a software engineer and prolific teacher on YouTube. Sumit is based in Dhaka, Bangladesh, where he runs a developer agency building projects for clients throughout Asia. We talk about: - How the hunger for learning is dying and people are increasingly...
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#204 The Most Important Skills Going Forward with CTO + Homebrew Maintainer Mike McQuaid
Today Quincy Larson interviews Mike McQuaid. He's a software engineer who previously worked at GitHub, and now serves as lead maintainer of Homebrew, a Mac package manager used by tens of millions of developers. He's based in Edinburgh, Scottland. He's worked remotely as a dev for nearly two...
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#203 First developer job at age 38 with lawyer turned software engineer Zubin Pratap
Today Quincy Larson interviews Zubin Pratap, a software engineer and manager from Melbourne, Australia. After nearly two decades working as a corporate lawyer, he taught himself programming using freeCodeCamp.org. Within two years, he landed a job as a software engineer at Google. We talk about…
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#202 How to get promoted as a dev without becoming a manager – Staff Engineer Santosh Yadav interview
Today Quincy Larson interviews Santosh Yadav. The son of a textile worker, he grew up inner-city Mumbai and studied hard to get into university. From there he's worked as a software engineer for 16 years. Along the way, he's picked up every distinction imaginable including Google Developer…
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#201 The "AI is going to replace devs" hype is over – 22-year developer veteran Jason Lengstorf
Today Quincy Larson interviews Jason Lengstorf. He's a college dropout who taught himself programming while building websites for his emo band. 22 years later he's worked as a developer at IBM, Netlify, run his own dev consultancy, and he now runs CodeTV making reality TV shows for developers. We...
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#200 How to build your own learning path using Open Source with Kunal Kushwaha
Today Quincy Larson interviews Kunal Kushwaha. He's a software engineer and prolific computer science teacher on YouTube. He failed the JEE, the Indian Engineering Entrance Exam, TWICE. But he persevered. He did 4 years of university but attended ZERO lectures. Instead he built his own learning...
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#199 Tips from a serial career changer with GitHub's Andrea Griffiths
Today Quincy Larson interviews Andrea Griffiths, who taught herself programming using freeCodeCamp while working in construction. She moved to the US from Colombia when she was 17, and within 6 months she joined the US Army. She ran a chain of gyms before landing a support role at a tech company,...
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#198 When NOT to use AI in your hackathon project with MLH winners Cindy Cui and Alison Co
Today Quincy Larson interviews Alison Co and Cindy Cui, two university students who won the NW Hacks hackathon with their tool that helps people who are losing their vision learn to read Braille. He met them when GitHub invited them to their big San Francisco conference, GitHub Universe to…
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#197 Harvard CS50 prof David J. Malan on why you should take your time learning programming
Dr. David J. Malan teaches computer science at Harvard. Over the past decade, millions of people have taken his CS50 course both in person and online. He joins us to talk about: 1. Why he still recommends learning the C programming language in 2026 2. How he intentionally nerfs hist student's...
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#196 Applying into the void with recruiter admin Abbey Perini
Abbey Perini taught herself programming at age 27 while working as an admin at an engineering recruitment agency. She has worked extensively with large legacy codebases and taught best practices to developers internationally. We talk about: - How to hit the ground running with a large legacy...
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#195 He Turned Down a FAANG Dev Job to Keep Working Remotely with Patrick Hartley
Patrick Hartley is a self-taught developer with nearly a decade of software engineering experience. When he was 21 he had to dropped out of college to provide for his family. He taught himself programming while working at a thrift store. After building his own apps and freelancing, he became the...
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#194 First dev job at 45 – Interview with self-taught freeCodeCamp grad Eric Carlson
Eric Carlson is a self-taught software engineer at Cisco. In his early 20s, he worked his way up to manager at the busiest Dominos Pizza in Canada. He eventually went to college and studied liberal arts, then worked as a teacher for two decades before teaching himself programming using...
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#193 From injured athlete to software engineer with Kaleb Garner
Kaleb Garner is a software engineer working at a medical technology app company. He got a scholarship to play baseball at a state university, but a serious knee injury ended his career and he dropped out. After moving back in with his parents and working at an optometry office, he decided to…
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#192 Evan You – From Art School Kid to Open Source Legend
Evan You is the creator of the popular Vue JavaScript library for front end development and the Vite JavaScript build tool that a lot of devs use as a boilerplate for their new projects. He's a self-taught developer based in Singapore. He shares tips for: - Getting involved in open source…
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#191 From manufacturing worker to first developer job at age 43 with Thomas Gooch
He's a self-taught software engineer who got his first developer job at age 43. He spent decades working in manufacturing while raising his kids, before using freeCodeCamp to learn programming. He was able to translate his JavaScript skills into working on enterprise Java apps, and now works at a...
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#190 Lone Wolf Dev turned Open Source Super Contributor Tom Mondloch
Tom Mondloch quit programming after he finished community college. After a few years of odd jobs, he decided to get back into programming and discovered freeCodeCamp. He was just learning his own way, and didn't think freeCodeCamp's linear curriculum would be worth his time. But he stuck with it,...
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#189 Learn Chess and Become a Better Developer with Ihechikara Abba (ELO rating of 2285)
On this week's freeCodeCamp podcast we're talking with software engineer Ihechikara Abba, who has a chess ELO rating of 2285, putting him among top competitive chess players. We just published his freeCodeCamp course on chess end games, and an accompanying handbook. We talk about: how learning...
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#188 Playing the Developer Job Search Game to Win in 2025 with Danny Thompson & Leon Noel
For this week's interview, we've got a special treat. I'm talking with two legends in the self-taught developer community. Danny Thompson worked for 10 years at a Tennessee gas station, frying chicken for people to eat, sometimes working 80 hour weeks just to provide for his family. And yet…
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#187 How to focus on building your skills when everything's so distracting with Ania Kubów
For this week's interview, I'm talking with Ania Kubów. She's a software engineer and prolific programming teacher on YouTube. She shares tips for: - Getting into game development and using JavaScript and browser games as an entry point - How to keep your focus in an increasingly distracting…
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#168 How to use AI as an accelerator, not a crutch, with freelance engineer Ankur Tyagi
For this week's interview, I'm talking with Ankur Tyagi. He's a software engineer who's worked at multinational companies like Volvo, Barclays, and Accenture. He grew up in Pune, India and now lives in Gothenburg, Sweden. Ankur is a prolific contributor to freeCodeCamp's open source learning...
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#185 From Hospital Janitor to Developer with Emmett Naughton
On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Emmett Naughton. He worked as hospital janitor for years while teaching himself programming using freeCodeCamp. He's founder of Coder Dads, a chat community where dads encourage one another. We talk about…
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#183 From drop-out to backpacker to self-taught developer with Dominick Monaco
On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Dominick Monaco. He dropped out college to hike the Appalachian Trail, a 2,200 mile backpacking route across the US. After working in nature conservation for 3 years, he taught himself how to program and now…
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#182 Abandoning med school to become a software engineer with Edidiong Asikpo
On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Edidiong Asikpo. Didi is a software engineer. She grew up in Lagos, the biggest city in Nigeria and the biggest tech hub in Africa. Didi got into medical school. But while waiting for her studies to start, she...
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#184 Senior Playstation Engineer's tips for learning new tools and getting things done
On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Dilip Krishnamoorthi. He's a software engineer working at Sony, building user interfaces for Playstation game consoles where he's been for 10 years. We talk about: - How he dropped out of a traditional Indian...
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#181 How to turn Open Source into a Job with Nick Taylor
On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Nick Taylor. He's a software engineer from Montreal and a prolific open source contributor. We talk about: - Why trying to build your own tooling will ultimately limit your app development - Tips for getting...
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#180 We are truly in the Hackathon Era – Namanh Kapur interview
On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Namanh Kapur. He's a senior software engineer at LinkedIn. He also creates YouTube videos to help devolopers with their careers. We talk about: - Tips for getting hired in the post-Leetcode world - Tips for...
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#179 799 rejections... but he got the job! Braydon Coyer developer interview
On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Braydon Coyer. He's a software engineer who started building mobile apps in high school – one of which even out-sold Angry Birds for a few days. He dropped out of his computer science degree program once he…
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#178 From freeCodeCamp to NASA with Data Engineer Joe Hill
On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Joe Hill. He's a software engineer who works on a data platform for NASA. Joe taught himself programming for 4 years while working as a janitor. As the single father of two Autistic boys, he first used his...
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#176 Rust VS Go VS TypeScript which back end language is for you with Tai Groot
On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Tai Groot. He's a back end software engineer and maintains an open source project used by companies like Google. For the first half of the interview we talk about back end programming languages. Then he shares…
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#176 From Therapist to six figure freelance dev
On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Kelly Vaughn. She's a self-taught software engineer who ran her own developer agency. She was also the founding CTO at financial technology startup. Kelly runs the popular Ladybug Podcast focused on women in…
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#175 From electrical engineering student to CTO with Hitesh Choudhary
On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews former CTO and prolific programming teacher Hitesh Choudhary. We talk about: - The limits of AI in building a robust codebase - Time management - Higher Education in India - Lessons from training developers -...
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#174 How to Survive in Tech When Everything's Changing w/ 21-year Veteran Dev Joe Attardi
On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Joe Attardi. He's a software engineer and prolific author of programming books. We talk about: How software development has changed over the past 21 years Tips for suriving AI's sweeping changes to the field The...
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#173 Laid off but not afraid with X-senior Microsoft Dev MacKevin Fey
On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews MacKevin Fey. He just got laid off last week from his senior engineering role at Microsoft. We talk about: How Mack's approaching the job search after being laid off Tips for building your own financial safety…
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#172 How to make Developer Friends When You Don't Live in Silicon Valley, with Iraqi Engineer Code;Life
On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews software engineer and live coding streamer Code;Life. For those of you watching the video version of this interview, she lives in Iraq and she uses a 3D avatar to protect her identity. We talk about: Training...
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#171 Ditching a Microsoft Job to Enter Startup Purgatory with Lonewolf Engineer Sam Crombie
On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Sam Crombie. He's a software engineer and prolific open source contributor to freeCodeCamp. He abandon his job at Microsoft, got into Y Combinator, and is currently in startup pivot hell trying to decide how to…
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#170 From Art School Drop-out to Microsoft Engineer with Shashi Lo
On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Shashi Lo. He's a software engineer at Microsoft. He grew up the child of refugees. He wanted to start earning money and build his family so he abandoned his art school degree and taught himself how to program.…
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#169 From fast food worker to cybersecurity engineer with Tae'lur Alexis
On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Tae'lur Alexis. She's a developer and security analyst. Instead of going to college, Tae'lur spent years working various fast food and retail jobs. Tae'lur taught herself Python and JavaScript using freeCodeCamp...
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#168 From Accountant to Data Engineer with Alyson La
On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Alyson La. She taught herself how to code while working as an accountant at GitHub and was able to transition to a data scientist there, then ultimately a software engineer. After one of her kids got diagnosed…
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
The official podcast of the freeCodeCamp.org open source community. Each week, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews developers, founders, and ambitious people in tech.Learn to math, programming, and computer science for free, and turbo-charge your developer career with our free open source curriculum: https://www.freecodecamp.org
HOSTED BY
freeCodeCamp.org
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does The freeCodeCamp Podcast have?
The freeCodeCamp Podcast currently has 100 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is The freeCodeCamp Podcast about?
The official podcast of the freeCodeCamp.org open source community. Each week, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews developers, founders, and ambitious people in tech.Learn to math, programming, and computer science for free, and turbo-charge your developer career with our free open source...
How often does The freeCodeCamp Podcast release new episodes?
The freeCodeCamp Podcast has 100 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to The freeCodeCamp Podcast?
You can listen to The freeCodeCamp Podcast on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts The freeCodeCamp Podcast?
The freeCodeCamp Podcast is created and hosted by freeCodeCamp.org.
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